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jfruh writes "Imagine that you're a lawyer who also runs a popular sexual fetish podcast. Or that you're a blogger on political issues and you want to determine for yourself who you're going to get into political arguments with. Or you're a transgender woman who isn't out to your real-life associates but you want to explore your gender identity online. Or that you're a female gamer who wants to play World of Warcraft without being hit on or harassed. All of these people have perfectly good reasons for wanting to use a pseudonym online. And yet more and more websites are making it difficult or impossible to do so, often for perfectly legitimate reasons of improving civility and stopping anonymous abuse. How can pseudonymity — one of the key foundations of early internet communities — be saved?"

Even then, you're often given an choice to have your billing information different than your account information. If you don't want the transactions on your credit card tied to your purchases, there are ways around that as well.

This seems like an attempt to appease everyone without actually understanding the issue.

To the extent "banning" pseudonyms pleases some people, it does so by letting them retaliate. After you say something that displeases anyone in a position of power---an employer, a bitchy parent of a child in school, a litigious person, a government spook---they can use your non-pseudonymous name to find you in another area and retaliate. It's possible to retaliate across time as well as forum: when you seek employment, your employer in the position of power can Google your name and look for distant past speech. And the proportion of retaliation is entirely up to the person in the position of power.

If only we could enable this retaliation for things "everyone" agrees are bad, like "trolling," and not for being gay or having a political view that some people don't like.

We can't do that. What we can do is have a class of people who's much less vulnerable to retaliation than everyone else. Surprise: these people think you're "hiding behind" your pseudonym. This is the chief effect at work here, and your plan makes it worse, not better.

If you are going to make a prescription it should be the opposite one: revealing your "real name" should be forbidden on the forum because even when only some people do it, it increases the power imbalance. proposed rule: If you use a name intended to look real, or claim that something is your real name, or reveal your real name in the text of your comment, you're banned.

"To the extent "banning" pseudonyms pleases some people, it does so by letting them retaliate."

Precisely. It puzzles me why many people don't understand this.

Our Founders (and for that matter, the Supreme Court) acknowledged that a Democratic form of government is not possible without free and anonymous speech, and anonymous voting. And anonymity requires pseudonymity.

And this is so precisely because without anonymous speech, it becomes possible to retaliate against people for their speech. An employer can retaliate if an employee supports politics he doesn't like, for example. Or the governmen

... a Democratic form of government is not possible without free and anonymous speech, and anonymous voting.

A democracy is impossible with anonymous voting. If you can't determine that the person who is voting has a right to vote, then anyone can walk in and vote. If you can't determine that someone has already voted, then they can vote a dozen or more times. You can't have the concept of "one person one vote" if you can't determine when that one person has cast his one vote.

What you are thinking of is secret ballots, not anonymous voting. It is absolutely imperative that you identify the person who is doing the voting and his right to be there, and only at that point should the origin and content of the actual vote become unidentifiable.

A potential employer is in no more powerful a position as you are. They need workers, you need a job.

Bull. Fucking. Shit. Please read section 2.5 [raikoth.net] for a succinct explanation of why this is patent nonsense. This argument has been closed. Your position is simply erroneous. You are deluded, or being intentionally misleading when you repeat this piffle.

I am. Everyone I know are. It's because, at the end of the day, I'm an average person. I have no inherent advantage over another average person. Now, there are schools of economic thought that say that I should thereby starve to death or at the very least live in horrible misery since, after all, I can be easily replaced. And once upon the time, these schools got us the Gilded Era and its robber barons, and people like me got just that. Then we joined together, recognized our common plight, and formed the unions to put a stop to that ruthless exploitation. And now I get paid a decent wage for putting in a reasonable effort.

So I, for one, will continue supporting the unions. And you will undoubtedly continue looking down at them, never understanding that your own economic position depends not on your undoubtedly superhuman abilities but us average people being able to demand a decend wage, thus forcing the choice to be between your elite skills and elite pay and my mediocre skills and mediocre pay rather than my mediocre skills and starvation wage.

But hey, disregard that, it's far more satisfying to keep having delusions of grandieur.

Give people the choice of creating a "Real Name" account with proof or a "Pseudonym" account, and make this choice visible to everyone else.

One of the big reasons for anonymity is protection of free speech. If you haven't noticed, anyone can be silenced with a threat of a lawsuit for slander, libel, terroristic threats, trade secrets, and the list goes on. Giving a website "proof" just makes it that much easier to silence someone regardless of whether they're operating under a pseudonym or not; The website is the first thing targeted by the anti-free speech crowd's lawyers.

The only way for free speech to survive is to rebalance the power imbalance between the people who have lots of money and can simply threaten someone and drag them into court, sucking their life savings away... and the poor people who want to express an opinion, but lack advanced technical tools to obscure their true identity. And the first step in doing that, is something like Tor where an IP address or e-mail address can't be matched to a realworld identity. mailinator and Tor are a powerful combination for normalizing those relationships to an equal footing.

That's precisely why the wealthy are trying so hard to destroy them: It allows democratic discourse, the ability for people to organize anonymously against them and their corrupted interests and greed.

I made the mistake of using my real name on hulu, then I found out my activity was searchable on google. so then I had to change my name to something else then cancel account and create a new account with a fake name just so people can't see what/how many shows I've watched.

Needless to say I will never get a hulu plus account.

And more importantly, I never use my real name unless I absolutely have to. I wasn't so careful in the 90s, so my name still shows up next to posts I have made back then.

There was a brief period after Google bought DejaNews when you could request and have your Usenet posts deleted from their archive. Thank goodness. I was one of those loud ignorant linux fanboys back in circia 1996. Well before it was as uncool and derpy as today, but its good that I was able to erase the part of that I did under my real name.

The thing that always vaguely bothers me about that, though, is that if everyone can hide or delete their embarrassing activities, then that stuff remains embarrassing, instead of us as a culture growing up and accepting that past behaviours don't damn a person forever. If the majority of us have things we wouldn't want people to judge us on (which I think is a fairly reasonable hypothesis), and then we all knew those things, I'm pretty sure our culture would change to be less judgmental. It's the same prin

You can't just speculate that it does. You can't even play games of association that don't prove causality. You need to actually show it. I understand it matches your intuition, but I think your intuition is wrong.

It removes the ability to **easily** create dozens (or even hundreds) of sockpuppet accounts.

Especially on reddit, dozens of pseudonymous accounts will stalk me and attack me at a moment's notice, even after I've been away for a year or more. I have no idea if this cabal is made up of 12 people or just 1 deranged lunatic, or any combination thereof. I just know that they know my real name, address, etc. and I know NOTHING about them.

Our local newspaper publishes almost everything online. It also allows people to make comments. A few years ago, they decided to deal with the level of uncivil comments by requiring everyone to establish an account before posting. After a few months, it was mostly back to normal, but marginally better. Then this summer, they switched to requiring a Facebook or Linked-In login, and almost all commenting stopped--not just the problem comments, all comments.

I wonder how this will shake out for a major Puget Sound newspaper that a couple days ago they announced they are going that direction, using Facebook logins and dropping the anon/pseud posting ability. But this would be where the nonpersonal/semipersonal throwaway Facebook accounts come in...

There have been numerous studies about the behavior of people with and without a means of positive identification. Unfortunately I can't find the references (at work, ya know...), but two distinct studies come to mind. The first was people in cars and the cognitive disassociation we have with other drivers, we don't often see faces or make eye contact, so other people just become cars, inanimate objects we cannot empathise with. As a result, we have no issues screaming at that mother of 3 who's trying to ke

There's also the issue that I won't even make a comment if there's even remotely a chance of controversy, and if that's true there's no need to speak up in a forum or letter to the editor anyway. Ie, if I wanted to make some pro or anti gun control statement, I know it would generate controversy no matter what side of the issue it is. Similarly, any statement regarding the Israel/Palestine peace process will generate extremely angry responses (even a middle of the road moderate stances are seen as anathem

Same thing happened on ESPN.com recently when they went to requiring a facebook log in. Where before you frequently got hundreds or thousands of comments on stories, now you rarely see more than a dozen.

Few social networking sites... almost none... are really able to figure out your real name. They might ask you to give a "real name"... and you can do that... but it doesn't have to be your real name.

You can be Bruce Wayne... Or George Washington... or whatever. How are they going to stop it? Pull a credit card off you? Who is paying for social networking? Exactly.

There are a lot of data bases with a lot of information on everyone. But how much of that information is actually accurate? The dirty little secret is that most of the information in those databases is garbage.

Which is good for us. Keep filling it with garbage. When the data miners open wide, stuff their mouths with trash and keep shoveling until they're full. They'll believe they have some means to filter fact from fiction but they're welcome to try.

This is the price of an automated system. Computers as we all know are stupid. Very easy to lie to them. And are we under any legal obligation to not lie to these people? No we are not. And even if we were, and I'd love to see a lawyer try to get a jury to convict someone of such a thing, then would it be worth the effort even to set an example? Not really.

That works, until you actually *do* need them to have your real name for some other reason. My best friend from high school did exactly that for WoW, because he didn't see any reason for them to have his real name, so he just gave them a fake "real name". Then, a couple years later, he sent them money for a renewal and their system was messed up and didn't process it right, and when he went to complain, they had a huge mess trying to fix it because his "real name" wasn't his actual real name.

In the event that you have to pay, you do not need the payment information to match the account information. For example, if some child sets up an account on one of these systems his parents will ultimately pay for it through their credit card etc. Thus the payment information does not match the account name.

So you say, "yes, my name is Bruce wayne... And this is the payment method"... there is no need for them to match.

And are we under any legal obligation to not lie to these people? No we are not.

As a matter of fact, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gives us the right to lie.

I was raised not to lie under any circumstances. It was a long time before I realized that this is impossible. Truth is slippery, and in truth, it cannot be fully known. I trudged through life doing my best to be honest in all but the "white lie" social situations. Over time, I realized how gullible I was, as when one is honest, it is a natural assumption that others are honest with you. Eventually, I became more a

First thing any trained interrogator will tell you is, everyone lies. In fact, psychologists expect a certain degree of lying during a forensic psychiatric examination. People who show up as not lying a little, don't sweat a little, are very probably sociopaths. The fact is, some amount of lying is healthy. We lie to protect our egos, our worldview, or the people we love. We lie to protect ourselves. And this isn't a bad thing. Lying, by itself, is just a social behavior. It's the motivation behind it that makes it good or bad.

We don't lie all the time. In fact, we lie very little as a society. But it is essential to our survival that we do. Sun Tzu wrote several thousand years ago that the best way to motivate your soldiers is to put them on what he termed "death ground". That is, intentionally leading them to a place where there can be no retreat from the enemy. They then fight harder and hold nothing back. Sun Tzu knew that all warfare is deception, even to one's own troops. But it saved lives; Those soldiers might have run themselves ragged retreating constantly. By forcing the conflict, choosing the time and place, at a time when the soldiers would have maximum effectiveness against the enemy, casualties on his side were minimized. But you better believe that he didn't tell the soldiers he knew he was setting them up for a situation with no escape. He lied to them. And because of that, they survived.

People lie about their age so they can join the military early. Maybe they come from a broken home, are constantly physically and sexually abused, and it's the only way out. So they lie, and it means they survive, emotionally if not physically as well. Honesty is a virtue, but like any virtue you can take it to excesss -- you can get yourself killed, or hurt, or those you love.

If there's one thing I've learned about morality, it's that it cannot be inflexible. Sometimes you have to sacrifice one ideal to protect an even bigger one. Sometimes, you have to sacrifice a short term set back to achieve a long term success. Lying is directly tied to morality -- you can't talk about one and not the other. So I'm not saying don't try to be honest, but remember it's a virtue... and virtues come before doing the right thing, at the right time, with the right words.

If you lie because it protects a principle of yours, or perhaps if what you do goes beyond principles and into the realm of love, which is perhaps beyond right or wrong, then I will not judge you poorly for it. I only judge liars who are motivated wealth, power, privilege, or advantage over others... I judge them by their vices, not by their virtues. So I guess all I'm saying, if I'm saying anything at all, is not to overburden yourself with guilt if you find you have to lie to do right. But be careful; If you find yourself saying you have to lie to protect others, or are doing something for another's own good then be warned. In all my experience in life, I have yet to find someone who made such an utterance, and good came from it.

The terms of service do not have the full force of civil or criminal law - despite the providing company wanting them to. You can break the ToS all you want and I promise the SWAT team won't come and break down your door. Unless of course you're breaking the law as well.

I've always wondered about some web of trust available for this. For example:

I have a website, and want people to comment. Someone decides to authenticate with a keyID. My server checks what certificates are associated with the public key. One cert from a semi-trustworthy source shows the anon ID is actually associated with a live person. Another cert from a decently trustworthy source shows the person is a frequent poster at a website. Still another shows that the ID has been in use on sites on a daily basis without any site bans for a few years.

With this info in mind, even though I have no clue whom the person is, I can reasonably assume that it will be either someone good at ID theft, or someone that likely won't be trolling/spamming.

A reputation based system would be useful. The public key can be anonymous, but with CAs (of varying trust levels), I can find that the person has been proven to be not a bot, has a positive reputation on various sites, is known by friends and people I do trust, etc. Of course, on the other hand, I get a key that has absolutely zero certificates on it, I'd probably not bother to allow it on.

With tracking cookies and javascript hacks being as prevalent as they are I've been using separate sandboxes for browsing profiles for some time now with Sandboxie. I suppose I could go extra paranoid and throw in a proxy, too.

As long as the sites which know your real identity are walled away from the rest of the internet tracking then some level of anonymity can still be expected.

Except for that last one ( female gamer who wants to play World of Warcraft without being hit on or harassed), I can see why you might want to be using a pseudonym, but I wouldn't expect it to really cover your identity either. If you have a big online presence, people will be able to figure out who you are.

As far as games go, I like online games using the "Mario Kart" model much better than anything else. When you're playing against the general public, it's more enjoyable to just play. No talking, no

If you have a big online presence, people will be able to figure out who you are.

I used to follow a pediatrician who would often rail against the conventional wisdom - he happened to be very science-based and would not put up with patients who demanded scrips for viruses, etc. He would blow off steam on his blog.

Over time he started to leak info about himself - where he went to school, some nearby towns, etc. I left a comment or two advising him to stop doing that.

A bit later he started talking about a court case he was involved in. This was about the time the "hunt was on" for @FakeSteveJobs and I was curious to see what was possible - I did a few google searches and it wasn't too hard to figure out who he was, since court filings are public.

A month or so later, he disclosed that opposing council's staff had done the same, and used his blog posts to force a settlement.

My take away: if you're going to do something like this, never include any personal details and/or never cross paths with the legal system. But if I lived near his town, I'd definitely take my kids there.

I work with children in a different capacity, and in a country where the public perception is that every rock hides a pedophile. As someone who works with children, I need to be constantly on my guard and display all the sexuality of a banana. I also need to maintain the most perfect PC image, and never say anything that could insult any ethnic or religious minority. If it became public that the school hired someone who considers religion in general a dangerous delusion, it could expose them to legal action - and they'd fire me in a heartbeat to save themselves.

I'm not sure "anybody" has to "do anything" at all - there are many models for communication and people can - for the moment, anyway - use whichever ones they like.

I'm an old Usenet fan, but am perfectly aware the ability to nymshift led to a culture of spamming and verbal harrassment that are basically unacceptable and that helped kill Usenet as a communication platform (not totally; I'm still on it, as are others, but it's a shadow of its former self).

Slashdot allows a pseudonym and if you want to advertise your website or Twitter feed, you can do so. You can also be anonymous if you like.

Reddit allows pseudonyms and even throw-away accounts, and many people think that's been a big part of its success. On the other hand, Facebook requires you to use a real name. At first, that kept people honest, but now we've seen it's not that hard for spammers and scumbags to set up fake accounts and Facebook is somewhat powerless to stop it. So that did or did not work.

My point is just that there are many existing models, and they compete for attention. If your transgendered lawyer wants to run a podcast, s/he'll decide whether to do it under her own name on Facebook or using a pseudnym elsewhere. The platforms compete. Bloggers who want to get name recognition can use their name; bloggers who want anonymity can blog under a fake name.

There's a good debate waiting about the merits of the different platforms. And it's essential Netizens fight against any effort to do away with anonymity at the policy level. But for the moment I'm not convinced there's a crisis of any sort, or any need for people to "act now" to "save the internet."

TFS (and, if I were to read it, I suppose TFA) make it sound like there's a one-size-fits-all global identity model for all websites. If HuffPo or Facebook or even gmail decide to eliminate trolls by requiring proof of real identity, then it must follow that SecretKinkySex.com must also do the same.

No.

I actually agree that mainstream news sites have good reason for reducing anonymity for exactly the reasons stated -- to eliminate, or at least reduce to a manageable level, trolls. They could even argue that it is in their best interests to do so.

Sites where just your presence on the site may cause irreparable damage to your personal life, your job, etc. -- not so much. It is in THEIR best interests to provide anonymity to the best of their ability.

So, yeah. If you are willing to have your name associated with your inflammatory posts, give your real name to the sites that require it. If not, avoid those sites and stick with places that allow anonimity; they will always do so or they will go out of business (even if "business" is just selling ad space). Problem solved.

They're not doing it to improve civility or stop anonymous abuse. These can both be solved by other, less intrusive mechanisms. Even Slashdot manages it: penalise anonymous users a lot, penalise new members a little bit, and require users to establish a reputation to gain full participation. If they lose that reputation, their ability to participate drops off. The real reason that they want real names is because it makes the information that they harvest and sell to advertisers more valuable if it's tied to a real name and address.

If your pseudonym is persistent, reputation still matters. It does not matter whether your pseudonym can be connected to your meatspace identity; reputation is still reptuation.

The real problem with online harrassment, trolling, etc is that people lend credence to transient identities. Not a problem here, because we have persistent pseudonyms and transient identities. Transient identities get treated with skepticism and ignored if they're being abusive. Persistent pseudonyms which have earned a reputation are granted wider latitude to make their case.

The problem is not pseudonymity, or even transient identities and anonymity. It is that most public fora do not make it easy to distinguish between a member in good standing and a drive-by-troll.

Not on Slashdot (my account predates getting married and having kids... back in the days when I only had myself to worry about and didn't think anything bad could come of having my real name out there), but on my blog/Twitter/etc. My wife and I use pseudonyms because we often discuss parenting issues and will post photos of our kids. We don't want someone tracking us or our kids down, though, so we don't use real names and obviously don't use our address or name of our kids' school. It's not impossible to track us down, but it makes it hard for some random Internet stalker (yes, I've encountered at least one) to call my work to "report" me to my boss for crimes she imagines I committed. (Said Internet stalker has harassed lots of people online and has contacted at least 1 person's employer because he used his real names/place of business online.)

One of the big reasons why I don't use Facebook or Google+ (besides lack of time to be on a million social networking sites), is that they require that you use (and reveal to the world) your real name. (If they really wanted to require real names but support pseudonyms, it wouldn't be hard to devise a system where your real name was hidden to all and your pseudonym was displayed instead.)

One of the big reasons why I don't use Facebook or Google+ (besides lack of time to be on a million social networking sites), is that they require that you use (and reveal to the world) your real name.

My reaction to that is... and always shall be, "proven by what?" Do either of them require a faxed photocopy of a government issued ID? No?

So I ignore it. As you should. As everyone should.

For all anyone knows, I'm an owl on both FB and Google as my real name. My real friends know who I am and that's all

Google killed a good part of "pseudonimity" with this crazy move to link your Google+ profile to your play/market reviews (even for just giving X stars without any comment).WTF? Ok, google knows a lot of stuff about me, where I am, it reads my email, some documents, knows a good chunk of what I browse, etc. WHATEVER. However, I just don't want to have a list of apps and apps rating associated with my name. It just feels wrong.

Solved, as in destroyed the system where people stopped wriing reviews?
I can easily disregard any Google+ comments, because now with certainty I can say that reviewers ether lack clear judgment and penned a review under their real name or are accepting monetary compensation for exposing themselves to a potential harm.

Google+ even follows some of us to Slashdot.
Fortunately my Google+ name is a pseudonym using the first and last names of two different actors. Real-looking is all they care about, not that you actually use your real name.

Admit that the reasons are not "perfectly legitimate", but have no basis in reality. Real names don't make people civil. Communities that are willing to kick out people who are abusive make people civil -- or, at least, omit the people who aren't.

'In the olden days", i.e. the 70s and 80s, computer accounts were rationed one per user by a central bureaucracy. It was almost always part or all of your real name. I did not have psuedonomy on uset then. Even though I would make "what if" arguments, people would still infer my known background had something to do with my argument. Many fewer trolls then too. the in 90s it went the other way and you could have as many accounts as you wanted in whatever handle you wanted. This caused account-remembering problems and well as poor troll behavior. Still you are only one level away from having your true identity known, either from clever detective work or a search warrant. I would not be totally boorish online.

How can pseudonymity â" one of the key foundations of early internet communities â" be saved?"

No it wasn't one of the key foundations of early internet communities. Quite the opposite in fact - it was seen as a great threat to Internet communities. Lemme cut and paste a post I made last year...

Once upon a time, when I first got on the Internet (late 1980s), there was no anonymity. Sysadmins voluntarily adhered to a policy where each user's online identity and their real identity were linked [rajivshah.com]. If someone ever found a way to break this link, it was considered a bug [google.com] which needed to be fixed. (Also notice that all the people in those old USENET posts are using their real names.) This system was staunchly enforced by admins who believed the net would devolve into chaos and rampant misbehavior if people were allowed to post anonymously.

There were a few people running their own servers who bucked the trend, but it wasn't until AOL joined USENET [wikipedia.org] that pseudonyms became a fact of life on the Internet. AOL allowed each account to have up to 5 usernames, ostensibly so family members sharing a single AOL account could each have their own ID. Obviously these extra usernames were quickly used to make pseudonyms by people wishing to post things online anonymously, which was good for free speech. But not surprisingly, spam was invented shortly thereafter.

All that's happening now is that the pendulum is starting to swing the away from complete anonymity as netizens struggle to figure out the best balance between real names and pseudonyms. The people at the pro-anonymity extreme won't like it, just like the people at the pro-real-name extreme didn't like it in the early 1990s. But as with most things in life the best balance is probably somewhere in between.

From the very underlying infrastructure, where you are who you declare you are, to all kinds of social interactions enabled by technology Internet is pseudonymous. 'Real Name' is a very recent fad pushed on us by social sites that are unhappy with limitations imposed on their data mining (and profits) by the very nature of the Internet.

Internet does not forget and you have no control over audience of any of your communications. Considering vast number of people involved, you can't even assume that your audience is reasonable or objective.

As a result using Real Name is not unlike talking to a room of armed schizophrenic psychopaths - no matter what you say you have very little control, regardless of presentation or content, as to if you are going to end up lynched for what you said.

A news forum here in Denmark decided to force everyone to use their real names, and as you registered with your real name they simply made a small change in the application so it showed your real name as author instead of the user-chosen username/pseudonym. This had the effect that old posts also suddenly were linked to real names, and those people with unique names were thus easy to track down physically.

Now, this happened around the time with the Muhammad Cartoon controversy, and we all know how crazy certain Muslim people are when it comes to 'insults' against their beloved prophet. Care to guess what happened? - Let's just say that visits by groups of baseball-bat wielding fanatics were involved. No deaths but that was mostly due to luck, not lack of trying. They took offense not only in the cartoons themselves but also that a few people commented on Muhammad's sexuality, specifically on the historical fact that he married a 6-year old (Aisha) and consummated the marriage when she was 9 years old.

The forum is mostly dead now. They still force posters to use their real name and nobody dares say anything, knowing what had happened and what still could happen.

I don't understand how people call "improving civility" legitimate. It's literally the exact opposite. The first amendment exists because you can offend people and/or not be civil. If you disallow that, you're saying people don't have a right to speak freely. Yet, we here we have craznar trolling. go figure.

I don't understand how people call "improving civility" legitimate. It's literally the exact opposite. The first amendment exists because you can offend people and/or not be civil. If you disallow that, you're saying people don't have a right to speak freely.

Yep, pretty much by definition, the right to "free speech" negates the ability to have the right to "not be offended". It pretty much *has* to trump it.

Sadly, with all the political correctness....which seems to now be being somewhat enforced by force of law, words are quickly becoming almost criminal.

I'll never forget what my grandfather taught me about free speech, after he helped liberate one of the camps he spent nearly 2 years in a full body cast thanks to one of the rag tag "werewulf" squads at the end of WWII dropping a wall upon him so if there was ANYBODY that had the right to hate Nazis it was him...yet he supported the right of the Nazis to march in Illinois. He said "that is what made us better than them, we let anybody speak, even though we don't agree with them".

I took his words to heart several years after he was gone when I was living in Dallas and saw skinheads recruiting, trying to feed on anti-Mexican sentiment. I just went to a store down the street and made up my own little sign, it said "ask me about the camps" and told those who stopped and asked what my grandfather had saw, the bodies piled up like cordwood, traincars overflowing with broken bodies, people so starved you couldn't tell male from female. needless to say the skinheads weren't too happy about that but one of the cops sent to keep an eye on the skinheads just parked his butt right next to me and said "he has as much right to speak as you do" and that ended that.

This is why I have fought against so called "hate speech" and "hate crime" laws as they aren't only trying to make some speech verbotten but they also seem to be designed around the concept of "protected classes" such as how they say nothing if you burn a bible but will throw you in jail if you burn a Koran. in America you should not be able to EVER ban speech, if you don't like what they are saying? Make your own sign and come up with a legitimate counter-argument,freedom of speech is too important to allow the politically correct to decide what is and is not acceptable.

Freedom of speech is about being free to express ideas and opinions, it is not about being free to express those ideas and opinions in whatever manner one chooses. Hate speech is not about express ideas and opinions but instead about intimidating and threatening others. You don't like blacks or Jews, fine, that is an idea or opinion you are free to express. Doing it in a manner that borders on inciting violence or is threatening or is an excercise of speech, but instead is one of power.

When I was in school, many of my teachers were veterans, not a few combat. The guy who taught high school civics was adamant about the right to speak and the right to vote. He offered some examples from his life, though none quite as stark as your grandfather's.

Circa '52 I spent a morning walking around Dachau. The gallows, ovens, and human-skin lampshade made a lasting impression that got only reinforced as I got older and learned more of what happened there and, by extension, the ki

"As part of a broader, chilling Chinese crackdown on Internet dissent, Chinese blogger Charles Xue appeared on Chinese state television in handcuffs on Sunday, denouncing his blog and praising government censorship."

Doubleclick Cofounder Responds to Patent Troll by Filing Extortion Lawsuit... "The patent troll's attorney also made the claim that calling someone a 'patent troll' was actually a 'hate crime' under 'Ninth Circuit precedent' and threatened to file criminal charges"

Freedom of speech is constantly under attack, especially by those who want their freedom at the expense of yours.

Wrong. This argument comes up a lot from the government alone is the source of all evil crowd. Look up the definition of censorship in any dictionary, not one of them states that government action is required to constitute censorship. Censorship is any action by any entity intended to suppress or conceal information. ClearChannel Communications is every bit as capable of censoring things as the FCC.

From Merriam Webster: "censorship noun \sen(t)-sr-ship\ : the system or practice of censoring books, movies, l

There are exceptions to first amendment protections. Speech that incites imminent lawless action, or "fighting words" (speech that leads to immediate physical retaliation) are not protected, at least in the US.

The purpose of letting people speak freely is to allow venting of grievances as an alternative to violent confrontation. But when those words in fact degrade civility to the point that violence increases, then we've reached diminishing returns for the first amendment. When individuals or groups can bully with impunity and induce violence against a person (sometimes by suicide), then I can start to see the problems with unfettered free speech rights.

It's not enough to justify the banning of anonymity, but civilization needs at least a little civility.

The concept of "rights" is not to benefit society. It's to benefit individuals. So the idea of "diminishing returns" is absurd. If people don't have the control to keep their hands in their pockets, it's jail time and bye bye. The first person to throw a punch gets punished. This whole "induce to violence" is bullshit.

I challenge you to "induce me to violence". Go ahead. I give you the freedom to say whatever you want and I can guarantee you that no mere words and pixels on a screen are going to drive me to hit you or anyone else.

The first amendment exists because you can offend people and/or not be civil. If you disallow that, you're saying people don't have a right to speak freely.

I'm sorry, but you're wrong. The first amendment exists to protect people from being punished by the government for having a dissenting view. It prevents those in power from using force to silence those whose only power is their speech. It's to prevent the U.S. from becoming Russia. Individual people, businesses, and non-government organizations are free to retaliate.

If you don't like the things that Orson Scott Card has to say about marriage, then you are free to boycott his books/movies, write angry letters to his publishers, and do many other things to tear down his livelihood and discredit his name. What the first amendment does is prevent some sheriff/judge/politician from having him imprisoned, and his possessions confiscated.

That is not my problem with the whole argument, its that it makes no damned sense! I mean lets take/. for an example where I personally think ACs should be banned since they have become nothing more than trolls these past few years, no different than those little punks that scream racist slurs all over console shooters....why would making everyone have an account be a bad thing, as long as you can put whatever you want as a UID? Its not like my business cards have "Hairyfeet" on them yet there are several

The assumed principle is that each of these people has the right to interact with others while hiding their real life identity. And to a certain extent I agree that one has the right to present oneself however one chooses.

But, what about my right to only interact with people who are willing to put their real life identity behind their words and actions? Any right that assures fetishists, trannys and political radicals a sense of anonymity also assures the rest of society the option to require a lack of anonymity.

If this means that we can't come to an agreement on how we will communicate, then that is the price to be paid for our mutual decisions.

There has never been any society in which an individual got to have full participation while simultaneously defining their own norms. Social norms are defined by the group and if you can't abide by those norms then you will have to pay the price that comes from your choice. And that is not unfair or an injustice.

But, what about my right to only interact with people who are willing to put their real life identity behind their words and actions? Any right that assures fetishists, trannys and political radicals a sense of anonymity also assures the rest of society the option to require a lack of anonymity.

Is that a new right? I don't remember anyone ever saying that it was a right.

Privacy has traditionally been held up as a right.Courage by someone with something to lose? Not so much.

You're welcome to ignore anonymous posters, or ban them from your site, but this topic was about the wane of anonymity in a culture that used to hold it as one of its most important characteristics.

But, what about my right to only interact with people who are willing to put their real life identity behind their words and actions?

Conviction of one's beliefs is not proof of their veracity. So while you can accept/ignore on this basis, it's not a good way to determine truthfulness. My point was that identity is not important unless the goal is to hold the speaker to your personal ideals via implied threats (public shaming, legal action, character assassination etc) should he go where you don't want him to. Why is it so important that you know for sure who it is that you're communicating with? If the argument is sound, accept that you've learned something from someone you'll never know, alter your content to acknowledge it publicly if applicable, and move on. If it's garbage, refute it to strengthen your position in the eyes of your readership who haven't made up their minds yet. Without this discipline, it's too easy to flip the switch at posts you don't agree with for emotional reasons, creating a nice shiny beacon of false consensus for your opinions. Of course, the kind of people who build these beacons usually aren't in it for telling the truth about much of anything. They have political angles or products to sell you for their own emotional or fiscal benefit.

Any right that assures fetishists, trannys and political radicals a sense of anonymity also assures the rest of society the option to require a lack of anonymity.

That can't be true. The two positions are mutually exclusive. Demanding that others identify themselves so that you can 'feel safe' isn't compatible with respecting those others' rights to anonymity, whatever they may be.

There has never been any society in which an individual got to have full participation while simultaneously defining their own norms. Social norms are defined by the group and if you can't abide by those norms then you will have to pay the price that comes from your choice. And that is not unfair or an injustice.

Yes, and those consensus driven, emotionally justified rationales were the driving forces behind most of the negative events in our history. They are a part of human nature, yes, but they shouldn't be encouraged, or lauded as honorable, because consensus is a poor way of gaining wisdom. Allowing anonymity allows people to stir up the mud, but denying it allows those in control of communications outlets to lie without challenge. That is far worse for a free society.

..or you could simply stop changing the terms used to describe your status whenever you feel like you want to be offended when someone uses the 'outdated' term. If term after term starts to make you feel dirty, then maybe you should look elsewhere for the source of those feelings.

The internet is a dangerous place. People have been lulled into believing that this is not the case. Protecting your identity is your first line of defense against crazies and anyone else that wants to do you harm.

Allowing net.crazies as a tradeoff for enabling everyone to avoid the real ones.

A lot of the "OMG Privacy!" complaints fall away if you allow people to disassociate from their real identity.

Actually, its the real world that is dangerous. The Internet is pretty harmless until it leaks into my real life.

A pseudonym is my way of being a member of a community without linking that membership to my real life. It differs from pure anonymity in that I can still damage my on-line reputation by being a jerk-wad.

The internet is a dangerous place. People have been lulled into believing that this is not the case.

No lulling involved. Only a massive increase in user base that was not raised on the idea that the Internet is an unknown outside of your normal neighborhood.

People who rode the rising tide of the Internet from early on learned where you could share your identity and where you needed to maintain anonymity. Those who jumped onto the bandwagon in the past decade have failed to recognize that such a distinction was even necessary.

How about if the elimination of anonymity also eliminates the possibility of individual liberty? If the government has sufficient knowledge of any individual, they will be able to control that individuals life to the point where they can find something to charge against them and arrest them at will. And don't tell me you won't have anything to worry about if you obey the law, if all of your actions are scrutinized they will find something. The lack of anonymity tips power so much into the government's hands that privacy is now necessary for freedom, and we need to find a way to guarantee it for ourselves or we are condemning humanity to perpetual servitude.

I know quite a few people, myself included, who either have two profiles on Facebook -- the public one and the private one -- or go with a pseudonym because they want to preserve their privacy. And not for nefarious reasons, because they only want to be connected to people significant to them and not to everyone. Like for instance, a lawyer may have a professional presence but keep the family elsewhere, or a teacher keeps everything out of where students and adminstration could see it.

It's been mentioned already that you can be shitcanned for what you put online, even if it's not a picture of your junk or a status update about a party you're at. It has been done for the weakest of reasons because somebody with some power doesn't agree with your private POV. Some people would like to be netizens like everyone else without having to deal with oversensitive vindictive dickheads snooping on them.

I just tell people I don't trust I don't have a Facebook since my username doesn't involve my given name in any form and usually don't friend anyone I work with, and without a lot of work some HR spy isn't going to find how how much I love kittens and midget bowling.

Ok, I don't use Facebook either, but I do use youtube. I don't have my real name associated with my account, and I only watch, not produce videos, so nobody would see my face. I uploaded a hand drawn face as my avatar.

I do have a real gmail account that I use for official business, but I never log into it with firefox. I keep an instance of chrome for all my real-world/real-name transactions that I don't use for anything else.

But I finally gave in and let google have my real phone number for password ver

If a random stranger stops you in the mall, and asks you for your name, address, phone number, list of hobbies, where you worked, where you went to school, and your religious and political views... would you tell them or say "nuts to that!" and walk past?

I don't see a reason to give people my real name, or any other info. When I'm at Radio Shack, and the employee asks for my phone number... 867-5309. Jenny? Yeah, she's my roommate.

I share my personal life with people I know. Not the world. It has nothin

They aren't. Pseudonymity/anonymity exists in the real world. I can observe or participate in a political rally without being personally identifiable. I can travel the world with only the customs officer knowing who I am.

Ideas and dialog are fostered by pseudonymity/anonymity without stigma or fear of being ostracized.

"I can observe or participate in a political rally without being personally identifiable."

If you are in public, you are identifiable. This doesn't mean you have been, it just means it is possible. Remember the Boston Bombing? Those guys were "anonymous" but quickly found out that they weren't really "unknown". Pictures surfaced, faces were identified, and the search was quickly started.

You are delusional if you think that you can be anonymous in public. Unidentified is not the same thing as "not being identifiable".

Remember the Boston Bombing? Those guys were "anonymous" but quickly found out that they weren't really "unknown". Pictures surfaced, faces were identified, and the search was quickly started.

Well... maybe.

What you need to remember is that the only reason the Boston Marathon bombers were caught as quickly as they were was because the bombers decided to kill a police officer and hijack a car. They were not caught because of pictures - they were caught because the guy who they hijacked escaped without his smartphone, which the police were then able to track.

They were only definitively identified when the first bomber was in the morgue.

Think of it this way. Let us take the number two reason for such breaches of personal privacy(money being the number one reason), i.e. terrorism.

If you were actually a foreign terrorist, and for some insane reason you did decide to discuss your "super secret plans" in email or over phone, unless you are completely retarded as well, you will use your local dialect instead of English. And you will use common words or phrase *in your own dialect* as previously agreed codewords. You will NOT communicate in E

but I doubt there will be a perfect automatic speech translation in place that can immediately translate

No, not immediately, unless you count five minutes later and semi-automated as close enough. Man, do you ever underestimate the scope and resources of the surveillance-industrial society.

Not only do they have human ears for every language of the world on tap, but probably also strange fish who speak seven different conlangs, some of whom can place your Klingon dialect to America, central Europe, or Japan

The problem with 'go elsewhere' is that there may well be nowhere else to go with anything close to the same functionality or community. If it's a 'free' service, then it most likely means that the business model relies on building profiles of the users as the basis for targeted marketing, which means strongly inhibiting anonymity. If it's a paid-for service, you need to pay, which pretty much kills anonymity (no, payment via bitcoin only is NOT a viable mass-market business strategy).

I deleted my FB, google+ and twitter accounts in June. Things are better without them.
Websites that want me to login with social and force that will get fake accounts if these things persist. They add nothing.

I avoided google+ initially because of the "real name unless you're famous" policy, and the fact that they seemed willing to cancel all your google services for a violation of this or other google+ policy. Since that included gmail, and I valued the gmail account I had more than I valued the potential value of google+, the choice was clear.

Well now, they've turned googletalk into googlehangout or something. And googlehangout requires a google+ login, AFAICT. Googletalk was nice, since I could forward googlevoice calls to googletalk on my PC at home (cell service had been pretty poor in my neighborhood for a while). Cell service has gotten better, at least.

From this, I assume that gmail will require google+ sooner or later, so now I'm moving away from that, since the switch could literally happen overnight like with googletalk.

Yes, there are some context where real names would be good, like that which you showed. But I think people will normally figure that it in some context when they go to such a place. Most of the rest of the time, people are interacting with the world, which is often dangerous in many ways. People should have this choice. Too bad we cannot trust these companies to have our real name and keep it secret, if they claim they would let us use their service under a nym. If I were putting up a forum, I would no